These Two Dark Fairytales Need to Unravel on Modern Consoles

Missing a dark Wonderland

The world can be a cold and dangerous place. We think about its darkest parts as we wrap ourselves in blankets and find a comfy armchair near a roaring fireplace, much like our ancestors did. Also like our ancestors, we turn to stories to understand how to survive the darkness: Don’t trust tricksters with magical powers, avoid suspicious fruit, and never venture into the woods alone.

These days, games teach us as often as classic novels and oral tradition. But they rarely explore the classic fairytales that entertained the generations that came before us, which is a shame. We need more games in touch with that rich tradition, like American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns. And once developers build them, we need to make sure that they remain playable for more than a console generation or two.

American McGee’s Alice launched in late 2000. Published by Electronic Arts, it earned an M rating from the ESRB, owing to its disturbing content. This was not the Wonderland you may have explored in Kingdom Hearts. The game secured a score of 85 on Metacritic, and came to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in June, 2011 as DLC.

In American McGee’s Alice, the resourceful hero returns to Wonderland, the place that made her famous. She finds it less familiar. Everything that was sinister about it has grown more sinister still. It rots from within, wounded by a malevolent force that only Alice can address. But doing so will require fortitude she never knew she had.

Alice: Madness Returns, the second game in the series, debuted on June 14, 2011. Critics didn’t love it quite as much as its predecessor, awarding it a lower average score overall. Chiefly, they found the combat irritating and the visuals outdated. But players were more receptive, celebrating the game’s engagingly dark vibe and the continued twists on the classic story of Alice.

Since 2014, we haven’t heard a lot from Alice, at least not the darker version of her. The public’s appetite for the property seems to have diminished shortly after Tim Burton’s 2010 live action film (which got a mobile game of its own). But those two games remain, enticing us to return to Wonderland once again with Alice. The thing is, most of us can’t.

Unfortunately, creator American McGee is among those unable to devote more time to Alice. In a 2023 video, in response to repeated questions from fans, he explained that publishing partner Electronic Arts has refused to fund or license a third game in the series. It would have been called Alice: Asylum. McGee stepped away from development for a period. More recently, he is back and working on a demo for a new game based on Plushie Dreadfuls, his popular line of slightly demented plushie toys. It is set to explore similar themes and a dark take on Wonderland.

Although the door appears to have been closed on continued adventures for Alice herself, at least Alice: Madness Returns is still available to buy on Steam. It’s just a shame that the first game has gone missing. If you want to go back to the very beginning of the series, you’re out of luck unless you bought the older title digitally years ago, or you’re ready to jump through some hoops today.

Somehow, their absence from modern console hardware doesn’t seem quite fair. Both games could so easily benefit from remastered visuals and appeal to current audiences. Brought back in that way, with a few quality-of-life improvements to sand down the rough edges, they would satisfy a whole new generation of fans looking for dark fairytale magic. Here’s hoping someone sees the wisdom in giving a new generation access to Alice at her bloodiest.